Sample Chapter

The sun was only half as hot as he had known sun to be, but it was hot
enough to keep him confused and dizzy. He was very weak. He had not
eaten for seventy-two hours, or taken water for forty-eight.

Not weak. He was dying, and he knew it.

The images in his mind showed things drifting away. A rowboat caught in
a river current, straining against a rotted rope, pulling, tugging,
breaking free. His viewpoint was that of a small boy in the boat,
sitting low, staring back helplessly at the bank as the dock grew
smaller.

Or an airship swinging gently on a breeze, somehow breaking free of its
mast, floating up and away, slowly, the boy inside seeing tiny urgent
figures on the ground, waving, staring, their faces tilted upward in
concern.

Then the images faded, because now words seemed more important than
pictures, which was absurd, because he had never been interested in
words before. But before he died he wanted to know which words were his.
Which applied to him? Was he a man or a boy? He had been described both
ways. Be a man, some had said. Others had been insistent: The
boy's not to blame. He was old enough to vote and kill and die,
which made him a man. He was too young to drink, even beer, which made
him a boy. Was he brave, or a coward? He had been called both things. He
had been called unhinged, disturbed, deranged, unbalanced,
delusional, traumatized, all of which he understood and accepted,
except unhinged. Was he supposed to be hinged? Like a
door? Maybe people were doors. Maybe things passed through them. Maybe
they banged in the wind. He considered the question for a long moment
and then he batted the air in frustration. He was babbling like a
teenager in love with weed.

Which is exactly all he had been, a year and a half before.

He fell to his knees. The sand was only half as hot as he had known sand
to be, but it was hot enough to ease his chill. He fell facedown,
exhausted, finally spent. He knew as certainly as he had ever known
anything that if he closed his eyes he would never open them again.

But he was very tired.

So very, very tired.

More tired than a man or a boy had ever been.

He closed his eyes.

2

The line between Hope and Despair was exactly that: a line, in the road,
formed where one town's blacktop finished and the other's started.
Hope's highway department had used thick dark asphalt rolled smooth.
Despair had a smaller municipal budget. That was clear. They had
top-dressed a lumpy roadbed with hot tar and dumped gray gravel on it.
Where the two surfaces met there was an inch-wide trench of
no-man's-land filled with a black rubbery compound. An expansion joint.
A boundary. A line. Jack Reacher stepped over it midstride and kept on
walking. He paid it no attention at all.

But he remembered it later. Later, he was able to recall it in great
detail.

Hope and Despair were both in Colorado. Reacher was in Colorado because
two days previously he had been in Kansas, and Colorado was next to
Kansas. He was making his way west and south. He had been in Calais,
Maine, and had taken it into his head to cross the continent diagonally,
all the way to San Diego in California. Calais was the last major place
in the Northeast, San Diego was the last major place in the Southwest.
One extreme to the other. The Atlantic to the Pacific, cool and damp to
hot and dry. He took buses where there were any and hitched rides where
there weren't. Where he couldn't find rides, he walked. He had arrived
in Hope in the front passenger seat of a bottle-green Mercury Grand
Marquis driven by a retired button salesman. He was on his way out of
Hope on foot because that morning there had been no traffic heading west
toward Despair.

He remembered that fact later, too. And wondered why he hadn't wondered
why.

In terms of his grand diagonal design, he was slightly off course.
Ideally he should have been angling directly southwest into New Mexico.
But he wasn't a stickler for plans, and the Grand Marquis had been a
comfortable car, and the old guy had been fixed on Hope because he had
three grandchildren to see there, before heading onward to Denver to see
four more. Reacher had listened patiently to the old guy's family tales
and had figured that a saw-tooth itinerary first west and then south was
entirely acceptable. Maybe two sides of a triangle would be more
entertaining than one. And then in Hope he had looked at a map and seen
Despair seventeen miles farther west and had been unable to resist the
detour. Once or twice in his life he had made the same trip
metaphorically. Now he figured he should make it for real, since the
opportunity was right there in front of him.

He remembered that whim later, too.

The road between the two towns was a straight two-lane. It rose very
gently as it headed west. Nothing dramatic. The part of eastern Colorado
that Reacher was in was pretty flat. Like Kansas. But the Rockies were
visible up ahead, blue and massive and hazy. They looked very close.
Then suddenly they didn't. Reacher breasted a slight rise and stopped
dead and understood why one town was called Hope and the other Despair.
Settlers and homesteaders struggling west a hundred and fifty years
before him would have stopped over in what came to be called Hope and
would have seen their last great obstacle seemingly within touching
distance. Then after a day's or a week's or a month's repose they would
have moved on again and breasted the same slight rise and seen that the
Rockies' apparent proximity had been nothing more than a cruel trick of
topography. An optical illusion. A trick of the light. From the top of
the rise the great barrier seemed once again remote, even unreachably
distant, across hundreds more miles of endless plains. Maybe thousands
more miles, although that too was an illusion. Reacher figured that in
truth the first significant peaks were about two hundred miles away. A
long month's hard trekking on foot and in mule-drawn carts, across
featureless wilderness and along occasional decades-old wheel ruts.
Maybe six weeks' hard trekking, in the wrong season. In context, not a
disaster, but certainly a bitter disappointment, a blow hard enough to
drive the anxious and the impatient from hope to despair in the time
between one glance at the horizon and the next.

Reacher stepped off Despair's gritty road and walked through crusted
sandy earth to a table rock the size of a car. He levered himself up and
lay down with his hands behind his head and stared up at the sky. It was
pale blue and laced with long high feathery clouds that might once have
been vapor trails from coast-to-coast red-eye planes. Back when he
smoked he might have lit a cigarette to pass the time. But he didn't
smoke anymore. Smoking implied carrying at least a pack and a book of
matches, and Reacher had long ago quit carrying things he didn't need.
There was nothing in his pockets except paper money and an expired
passport and an ATM card and a clip-together toothbrush. There was
nothing waiting for him anywhere else, either. No storage unit in a
distant city, nothing stashed with friends. He owned the things in his
pockets and the clothes on his back and the shoes on his feet. That was
all, and that was enough. Everything he needed, and nothing he didn't.

He got to his feet and stood on tiptoe, high on the rock. Behind him to
the east was a shallow bowl maybe ten miles in diameter with the town of
Hope roughly in its center, eight or nine miles back, maybe ten blocks
by six of brick-built buildings and an outlying clutter of houses and
farms and barns and other structures made of wood and corrugated metal.
Together they made a warm low smudge in the haze. Ahead of him to the
west were tens of thousands of flat square miles, completely empty
except for ribbons of distant roads and the town of Despair about eight
or nine miles ahead. Despair was harder to see than Hope. The haze was
thicker in the west. The place looked larger than Hope had been, and
teardrop-shaped, with a conventional plains downtown mostly south of the
main drag and then a wider zone of activity beyond it, maybe industrial
in nature, hence the smog. Despair looked less pleasant than Hope. Cold,
where Hope had looked warm; gray, where Hope had been mellow. It looked
unwelcoming. For a brief moment Reacher considered backtracking and
striking out south from Hope itself, getting back on course, but he
dismissed the thought even before it had fully formed. Reacher hated
turning back. He liked to press on, dead ahead, whatever. Everyone's
life needed an organizing principle, and relentless forward motion was
Reacher's.

He was angry at himself later, for being so inflexible.

He climbed off the rock and rejoined the road twenty yards west of where
he had left it. He stepped up onto the left-hand edge and continued
walking, long strides, an easy pace, a little faster than three miles an
hour, facing oncoming traffic, the safest way. But there was no oncoming
traffic. No traffic in either direction. The road was deserted. No
vehicles were using it. No cars, no trucks. Nothing. No chance of a
ride. Reacher was a little puzzled, but mostly unconcerned. Many times
in his life he had walked a lot more than seventeen miles at a stretch.
He raked the hair off his forehead and pulled his shirt loose on his
shoulders and kept on going, toward whatever lay ahead.

3

Despair's downtown area began with a vacant lot where something had been
planned maybe twenty years before but never built. Then came an old
motor court, shuttered, maybe permanently abandoned. Across the street
and fifty yards west was a gas station. Two pumps, both of them old. Not
the kind of upright rural antiques Reacher had seen in Edward Hopper's
paintings, but still a couple of generations off the pace. There was a
small hut in back with a grimy window full of quarts of oil arrayed in a
pyramid. Reacher crossed the apron and stuck his head in the door. It
was dark inside the hut and the air smelled of creosote and hot raw
wood. There was a guy behind a counter, in worn blue overalls stained
black with dirt. He was about thirty, and lean.

"Got coffee?" Reacher asked him.

"This is a gas station," the guy said.

"Gas stations sell coffee," Reacher said. "And water, and
soda."

"Not this one," the guy said. "We sell gas."

"And oil."

"If you want it."

"Is there a coffee shop in town?"

"There's a restaurant."

"Just one?"

"One is all we need."

Reacher ducked back out to the daylight and kept on walking. A hundred
yards farther west the road grew sidewalks and according to a sign on a
pole changed its name to Main Street. Thirty feet later came the first
developed block. It was occupied by a dour brick cube, three stories
high, on the left side of the street, to the south. It might once have
been a dry goods emporium. It was still some kind of a retail
enterprise. Reacher could see three customers and bolts of cloth and
plastic household items through its dusty groundfloor windows. Next to
it was an identical three-story brick cube, and then another, and
another. The downtown area seemed to be about twelve blocks square,
bulked mostly to the south of Main Street. Reacher was no kind of an
architectural expert, and he knew he was way west of the Mississippi,
but the whole place gave him the feel of an old Connecticut factory
town, or the Cincinnati riverfront. It was plain, and severe, and
unadorned, and out of date. He had seen movies about small-town America
in which the sets had been artfully dressed to look a little more
perfect and vibrant than reality. This place was the exact opposite. It
looked like a designer and a whole team of grips had worked hard to make
it dowdier and gloomier than it needed to be. Traffic on the streets was
light. Sedans and pick-up trucks were moving slow and lazy. None of them
was newer than three years old. There were few pedestrians on the
sidewalks.

Reacher made a random left turn and set about finding the promised
restaurant. He quartered a dozen blocks and passed a grocery store and a
barber shop and a bar and a rooming house and a faded old hotel before
he found the eatery. It took up the whole ground floor of another dull
brick cube. The ceiling was high and the windows were floor-to-ceiling
plate glass items filling most of the walls. The place might have been
an automobile showroom in the past. The floor was tiled and the tables
and chairs were plain brown wood and the air smelled of boiled
vegetables. There was a register station inside the door with a
Please Wait to Be Seated sign on a short brassed pole with a
heavy base. Same sign he had seen everywhere, coast to coast. Same
script, same colors, same shape. He figured there was a catering supply
company somewhere turning them out by the millions. He had seen
identical signs in Calais, Maine, and expected to see more in San Diego,
California. He stood next to the register and waited.

And waited.

There were eleven customers eating. Three couples, a threesome, and two
singletons. One waitress. No front-of-house staff. Nobody at the
register. Not an unusual ratio. Reacher had eaten in a thousand similar
places and he knew the rhythm, subliminally. The lone waitress would
soon glance over at him and nod, as if to say I'll be right with
you. Then she would take an order, deliver a plate, and scoot over,
maybe blowing an errant strand of hair off her cheek in a gesture
designed to be both an apology and an appeal for sympathy. She would
collect a menu from a stack and lead him to a table and bustle away and
then revisit him in strict sequence.

But she didn't do any of that.

She glanced over. Didn't nod. Just looked at him for a long second and
then looked away. Carried on with what she was doing. Which by that
point wasn't much. She had all her eleven customers pacified. She was
just making work. She was stopping by tables and asking if everything
was all right and refilling coffee cups that were less than an inch down
from the rim. Reacher turned and checked the door glass to see if he had
missed an opening-hours sign. To see if the place was about to close up.
It wasn't. He checked his reflection, to see if he was committing a
social outrage with the way he was dressed. He wasn't. He was wearing
dark gray pants and a matching dark gray shirt, both bought two days
before in a janitorial surplus store in Kansas. Janitorial supply stores
were his latest discovery. Plain, strong, well-made clothing at
reasonable prices. Perfect. His hair was short and tidy. He had shaved
the previous morning. His fly was zipped.